With 55 new cases, Bengaluru witnesses biggest single-day COVID-19 spike

The city saw its highest COVID-19 spike on Wednesday with the reporting of 55 cases in Bengaluru Urban. Five more deaths have also been reported.

With these, the city has 827 cases and officially 43 deaths.

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One of the largest categories of new cases were those who tested positive for Covid-19 with Influenza-Like Illness (ILI), a potential indicator of the disease manifested by fever and cold.

Though 15 ILI cases were reported on Wednesday, most “contact” cases were also linked to ILI. Ten primary contacts who tested positive for COVID-19 were infected by people with ILI. This includes four contacts of a 38-year-old man identified with ILI-Covid-19 on June 11 and two from an 86-year-old woman who died of COVID-19 on June 15.

Eighteen of the newly infected were those with Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI).

The new cases reveal that the state government’s focus on testing people showing symptoms of ILI and SARI is turning up a slew of new cases.

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According to information from the state COVID war room, testing from June 6 to 14 of 1,014 SARI cases in Bengaluru yielded 13 positive cases (or 1.85%). The testing of 1,096 ILI cases during the same period turned up 61 Covid positive cases (5.6%).

The two diseases also caused four of the COVID-19 deaths. One is a 70-year-old woman and Ganapathinagar resident diagnosed with ILI who died on Wednesday, while the second fatality is a 39-year-old woman from an unspecified part of the city with chronic kidney disease.

Patient 7630, a 64-year-old man from the city with ILI, died on June 15, while the fourth death is of a 61-year-old man who had SARI.

Cases in hotspots

At least four of the new cases that emerged on Wednesday were from Hongasandra, though health officials said this was not likely connected to an earlier outbreak in the area in April when 34 migrant workers from Bihar and Odisha were infected.

Two of the new cases were connected to Patient 6169, a 58-year-old woman who was diagnosed with SARI-Covid-19 on June 11. The other two are new cases.

A new case in Mangammanapalya, another erstwhile Covid-19 hotspot, had SARI.